Zzot!

Here’s my first round of comments on the new iPhone software:

• Remote is what the iPod application should have been from the start…and still isn’t.
• Since I heard about it, I thought real-time sync with MobileMe would be what made the package worth $99 for a lot of people. Having played with it for a few hours, I still think that, with one glaring exception — Windows. I could sync calendars to Outlook, or I could sync them to Outlook. I was syncing them to Outlook for about 20 minutes, and then I couldn’t stand it anymore.
• You can only set the category of a contact when you create it, just like before. What’s new is that you can do the same when creating an appointment.
• There’s still no custom alert sounds (as far as I can tell), and you still can’t set the New Mail sound, generally or per-account (or per-contact, or per-anything else useful).
• I don’t know what your App Store is showing, but mind is showing zero downloads for every app that I look at. Including apps that I’ve installed (and thus obviously downloaded).

Weblog | Tagged Apple, iPhone, MobileMe | Permalink | No Comments

A couple of days ago I finally checked out my current site on my PC at work. Sure, I could have tried IE7 through the magic of Fusion, but I don’t have my History of Internet Explorer VM on my MacBook Pro. I like their products as much as the next geek, but seriously — where the hell is my snapshot manager?

Anyway, my website. I learned something important when I looked at it in both IE6 and IE7. Okay, I learned two things. First, the background was more peculiar in IE7 than IE6. Strangely, the background was doing what it was supposed to in IE6. In IE7, on the other hand, the entire page flipped from the main background to the footer background whenever the top pixel of the footer was above a certain point.

Second, the color was wrong. If your monitor’s color reproduction matches the one I have at work, the simple, light green gradient is gone, and The History of Human Nausea expressed as a 182 byte PNG takes its place. Otherwise, things looked okay. I haven’t decided yet whether I’m going to switch to colors that degrade gracefully or just declare certain monitors as too lousy to bother with. I’ll probably fix the IE7 issue though. Eventually.

Site Info | Tagged Color | Permalink | No Comments

The Good

All of the extensions that really matter to me work in the latest Firefox 3 beta.

The Bad

Notice, I said beta, not release candidate. A couple of them work in the latest RC.

The Ugly

I can still use extensions.checkCompatibility to get me through until they’re all flagged to work properly again.

Weblog | Tagged Firefox | Permalink | No Comments

In an earlier draft I was going to put some witty joke in here about lawyers being out of control. I finally came to my senses — obvious jokes aren’t jokes at all, they’re just annoying. Now, if only I had an intro to put here that I didn’t think was stupid:

You shall, in your sole discretion, avoid the excessive use of the Online Game so as not to disturb your healthy and sound life. KONAMI will not be liable for any social, mental, physical damages caused by the excessive use of the Online Game. Any troubles and/or conflict of interests among the users of the Online Game shall be resolved among such parties and KONAMI does not assume any liability or responsibility regarding such troubles and/or conflict of interests.

That was all in the first half of the EULA Scroll Box From Hell™. The second half, which was cheerfully titled “BASIC TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR USE OF KONAMI ID”, had four sections. These sections were called, and I swear I’m not making this up, Chapters. At what point, exactly, does your life go so wrong that you could write multiple chapters of legal restrictions, attach it to a game, and think this was a good idea?

Uncategorized | Tagged EULA, Games, IANMTU, Idiocy | Permalink | No Comments

Aside from the normal messing around with my style sheets, I added an early version of a Pepper I’m working on this week. I had a QuickTime checker in there before, but it was triggering the information bar in IE. Sure, “works in IE” isn’t exactly my driving concern here, but still. Let me know if you see any new¹ errors, warnings, or lost goats wandering around my website.

Speaking of IE, I haven’t looked at my latest style sheets in IE, so the whole place could be an unintelligible mess for all I know. Visually, I mean. You know — for different reasons than it usually is.

1. …or are “still seeing old” for that matter. [↩]

Site Info | Tagged Color, Mint, WordPress | Permalink | No Comments

1. You find an envelope on your desk claiming “2008 is almost here”
2. It’s currently May. Of 2008.¹
3. The envelope contains the 2008 edition of your current desk calendar.
4. The older model is displaying its cover page, rather than a month.
5. It’s a 2006 calendar.

1. Substitute any other year as needed. [↩]

Life | Tagged Clutter, Lists | Permalink | No Comments

More random tinkering with my website:

• Upgraded to the latest point release of WordPress.
• I switched to a more orthodox site layout, instead of the bizarre, half-assed crap that I had going on before. Consequences (intended and otherwise) include:
  • More stuff “just works” than used to, including almost anything related to how up-to-date stuff is (which hopefully will have more benefits than consequences).
  • I retired one of my private plugins, which served only to make part of my screwball setup work.
  • For the moment, authentication isn’t done over SSL (as it should be).
  • CSS files (or anything else belonging to my current theme) are no longer served over SSL (as they shouldn’t be).
  • You should have seen the mess that made of my live-preview in MarsEdit.
  • Spammers seem to be getting far less confused on the way to my form submission URL, resulting in a meteoric rise in the length of my spam queue — sorry, anyone trying to comment on my site who doesn’t have my e-mail address.
• I switched anti-spam plugins. Nothing against Spam Karma 2, mind you — it’s quite good, I just wanted to check out Akismet.
• Retired another one of my private plugins that now duplicates a core feature.
• Switched from WP Cache 2 to WP Super Cache, because the former wasn’t working properly on my site. Why cache a site that nobody reads? Why not!

Update: April 30, 2008

Found another one:

• All permalinks in my feeds have been invalid since I did this. I thought the only thing of consequence I had broken by not moving Mint properly was its up-to-date link — I was wrong. Bird Feeder was using the old hostname in the URLs it constructs.

Site Info | Tagged WordPress | Permalink | No Comments

One of my problems with Leopard has been that the way I use Finder stopped working. I set it to “Always open folders in a new window” and hold down option when I want to close the window I start from. This is actually different from the behavior with that preference off — when you open a new window, it has the saved view settings for that folder. When you navigate to a new folder in an existing window, the view settings from the old folder remain. With Leoopard, holding down option merely reverses the state of that preference. A day or two ago I thought I should try all the modifier combinations to be sure they just didn’t hide it on me, rather than get rid of it…and I quickly found it. Hold down control and option, instead of just option, while hitting command-down or whatever and you get the old (just holding option) behavior.

Weblog | Tagged Finder, Leopard, Mac OS X | Permalink | No Comments

Whoever sold this ad is a marketing genius. I mean honestly — if you were selling cookbooks, would you have realized you need to get on SourceForge? No, you wouldn’t have. You know why? I’ll tell you — you’re an idiot. Meddling amateurs like you or me would have been wasting our advertising budget on Food Network spots. Luckily, for all humanity, we have proper Madison Avenue types to save us from ourselves.

Click the image for the large version:

Rants, Raves | Tagged Ad-Spotting, IANMTU | Permalink | No Comments

Here’s what passes for normal conversation around here:

Me

Would you expect my components to get horked if I tried to export them both from the same FLA?

Marc

Uh, no. Why?

Me

Darn. They each have their own component name in the resulting SWC, but they end up having the same class name.

Marc

Are you using the same classes in them or something?

Me

I’m using some of the same classes, but the components themselves each have their own class. If I right-click on Export SWC File… in the library, both components are in the SWC, but with the same class name. And I can’t just export one component and then the other, because you get two copies of each, presumably only one of which works.

Marc

That’s weird.

Me

Did I mention that I was using an Adobe product?

Weblog | Tagged Adobe, AS3, Flash, Flex | Permalink | No Comments